Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality

Sublime Beginnings

If we want a term to describe the aesthetics of beginning, we could do worse than use the term sublime. The kind of sublime we need doesn’t come from some beyond, because this beyond turns out to be a kind of optical illusion of correlationism, the reduction of meaningfulness to the human–world correlate since Kant. OOO can’t think a beyond, since there’s nothing underneath the Universe of objects. Or not even nothing, if you prefer thinking it that way. The sublime resides in particularity, not in some distant beyond. And the sublime is generalizable to all objects, insofar as they are all strange strangers, that is, alien to themselves and to one another in an irreducible way. [28]

Of the two dominant theories of the sublime, we have a choice between authority and freedom, between exteriority and interiority. But both choices are correlationist. That is, both theories of the sublime have to do with human subjective access to objects. On the one hand we have Edmund Burke, for whom the sublime is shock and awe: an experience of terrifying authority to which you must submit. [29] On the other hand, we have Immanuel Kant, for whom the sublime is an experience of inner freedom based on some kind of temporary cognitive failure. Try counting up to infinity. You can’t. But that is precisely what infinity is. The power of your mind is revealed in its failure to sum infinity. [30]

Both sublimes assume that: (1) the world is specially or uniquely accessible to humans; (2) the sublime uniquely correlates the world to humans; and (3) what is important about the sublime is a reaction in the subject. The Burkean sublime is simply craven cowering in the presence of authority: the law, the might of a tyrant God, the power of kings, the threat of execution. No real knowledge of the authority is assumed—terrified ignorance will do. Burke argues outright that the sublime is always a safe pain, mediated by the glass panels of the aesthetic. That’s why horror movies, a truly speculative genre, try to bust through this aesthetic screen at every opportunity.

What we need is a more speculative sublime that actually tries to become intimate with the other, and here Kant is at any rate preferable to Burke. There is indeed an echo of reality in the Kantian sublime. Certainly the aesthetic dimension was a way in which the normal subject–object dichotomy is suspended in Kant. And the sublime is as it were the essential subroutine of the aesthetic experience, allowing us to experience the power of our mind by running up against some external obstacle. Kant references telescopes and microscopes that expand human perception beyond its limits. [31] His marvelous passage on the way one’s mind can encompass human height and by simple multiplication comprehend the vastness of “Milky Way systems” is sublimely expansive of the human capacity to think. [32] It’s also true that the Kantian sublime inspired the powerful speculations of Schelling, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and more work needs to be done teasing out how those philosophers begin to think a reality beyond the human (the work of Iain Hamilton Grant and Ben Woodard stands out in particular at present). [33] It’s true that in §28 of the Third Critique, Kant does talk about how we experience the “dynamical sublime” in the terror of vastness, for instance of the ocean or the sky. But this isn’t anything like intimacy with the sky or the ocean.

In subsequent sections, Kant in fact explicitly rules out anything like a scientific or even probing analysis of what might exist in the sky. As soon as we think of the ocean as a body of water containing fish and whales, rather than as a canvas for our psyche; as soon as we think of the sky as the real Universe of stars and black holes, we aren’t experiencing the sublime (§29):

While we may share Kant’s anxiety about teleology, his main point is less than satisfactory from a speculative realist point of view. We positively shouldn’t speculate when we experience the sublime. The sublime is precisely the lack of speculation. Should we then just throw in the towel and drop the sublime altogether, choosing only to go with horror—the limit experience of sentient lifeforms—rather than the sublime, as several speculative realists have done? Can we only speculate from and into a position of feeling our own skin about to shred, or vomit about to exit from our lungs?

Yet horror presupposes the proximity of at least one other entity: a lethal virus, an exploding hydrogen bomb, an approaching tsunami. Intimacy is thus a precondition of horror. From this standpoint, even horror is too much of a reaction shot, too much about how entities correlate with an observer. What we require is something deeper, that subtends the Kantian sublime. What we require, then, is an aesthetic experience of coexisting with 1+n other entities, living or nonliving. What speculative realism needs would be a sublime that grants a kind of intimacy with real entities. This is precisely the kind of intimacy prohibited by Kant, in which the sublime requires a Goldilocks aesthetic distance, not too close and not too far away (§25):

The Kantian aesthetic dimension shrink-wraps objects in a protective film. Safe from the threat of radical intimacy, the inner space of Kantian freedom develops unhindered. Good taste is knowing precisely when to vomit—when to expel any foreign substance perceived to be disgusting and therefore toxic. [36] This won’t do in an ecological era in which “away”—the precondition for vomiting—no longer exists. Our vomit just floats around somewhere near us, since there is now no “away” to which we can flush it in good faith.

Against the correlationist sublime I shall now argue for a speculative sublime, an object-oriented sublime to be more precise. There is a model for just such a sublime on the market—the oldest extant text on the sublime, Peri Hypsous by Longinus.  The Longinian sublime is about the physical intrusion of an alien presence. The Longinian sublime can thus easily extend to include non-human entities—and indeed non-sentient ones. Rather than making ontic distinctions between what is and what isn’t sublime, Longinus describes how to achieve sublimity. Because he is more interested in how to achieve the effect of sublimity rhetorically than what the sublime is as a human experience, Longinus leaves us free to extrapolate all kinds of sublime events between all kinds of entities.

Longinus’ sublime is already concerned with an object-like alien presence—he might call it God but we could easily call it a Styrofoam peanut or the Great Red Spot of Jupiter. The way objects appear to one another is sublime: it’s a matter of contact with alien presence, and a subsequent work of radical translation. Longinus thinks this as contact with another: “Sublimity is the echo of a noble mind.” [37] Echo, mind—it’s as if the mind were not an ethereal ghost but a solid substance that ricochets off walls. We could extend this to include the sensuality of objects. Why not? So many supposedly mental phenomena manifest in an automatic way, as if they were objects: dreams, hallucinations, strong emotions. Coleridge says about his opium dream that inspired Kubla Khan that the images arose as distinct things in his mind. This isn’t surprising if cognition is an assemblage of kluge-like unit operations (Ian Bogost’s term) that just sort of do their thing. It’s not that this pen is alive. It’s that everything that is meaningful about my mind resting on the pen can also be said of the pen resting on the desk. Consciousness may be sought after in the wrong place by neuroscientists and AI (and anti-AI) theorists: it may be incredibly default. Mind may simply be an interobjective phenomenon among many: a distributed mind that consists of neurons, desks, cooking utensils, children and trees. [38]

Let’s consider Longinus’ terms. Luckily for OOO there are four of them: transport, phantasia, clarity and brilliance. Even more luckily, the four correspond to Harman’s interpretation of the Heideggerian fourfold (Earth, Heaven, Gods, Mortals) as a set of descriptions of the basic properties of objects. The trick is to read Longinus’ terms in reverse, as we did with rhetoric in general. The first two terms, clarity and brilliance, refer to the actuality of object–object encounters. The second two, transport and phantasia, refer to the appearance of these encounters. It sounds counter-intuitive that brilliance would equate to withdrawal, but on a reading of what Plato, Longinus and Heidegger have to say about this term (ekphanestaton) more clarity will be reached.

1. Brilliance. Earth. Objects as secret “something at all,” apart from access.
2. Clarity: Gods. Objects as specific, apart from access.
3. Transport: Mortals. Objects as something-at-all for another object.
4. Phantasia: Heaven. Objects as specific appearance to another object. [39]

Each one sets up relationships with an alien presence.

(1) Brilliance. In Greek, to ekphanestaton, luster, brilliance, shining-out. Ekphanestaton is a superlative, so it really means “the most brilliant,” “eminent brilliance.” This eminence must mean prior to all relations. Longinus declares that “in much the same way as dim lights vanish in the radiance of the sun, so does the all-pervading effluence of grandeur utterly obscure the artifice of rhetoric.” [40] Brilliance is what hides objects. Brilliance is the secretiveness of the object, its total inaccessibility prior to relations. In the mode of the sublime, it’s as if we are able to taste that, even though it’s strictly impossible. The light of this inner magma is blinding—that’s why it’s withdrawal, strangely. It’s right there, it’s an actual object. Longinus thus calls this brilliance an uncanny fact of the sublime.

For Plato to ekphanestaton was an index of the essential beyond. For the object-oriented ontologist, brilliance is the appearance of the object in all its stark unity. Something is coming through. Or better: we realize that something was already there. This is the realm of the uncanny, the strangely familiar and familiarly strange.

(2) Clarity (enargeia). “Manifestation,” “self-evidence.” This has to do with ekphrasis. [41] Ekphrasis in itself is interesting for OOO, because ekphrasis is precisely an object-like entity that looms out of descriptive prose. It’s a hyper-descriptive part that jumps out at the reader, petrifying her or him (turning him to stone), causing a strange suspension of time like Bullet Time in The Matrix. It’s a little bit like what Deleuze means when he talks about “time crystals” in his study of cinema. [42] This is the jumping-out aspect of ekphrasis, a bristling vividness that interrupts the flow of the narrative, jerking the reader out of her or his complacency. Quintilian stresses the time-warping aspect of enargeia (the term is metastasis or metathesis), transporting us in time as if the object had its own gravitational field into which it sucks us. The object in its bristling specificity.

Longinus asserts that while sublime rhetoric must contain enargeia, sublime poetry must evoke ekplexis—astonishment. [43] This may also be seen as a kind of specific impact. In strictly OOO terms, ekphrasis is a translation that inevitably misses the secretive object, but which generates its own kind of object in the process. Ekphrasis speaks to how objects move and have agency, despite our awareness or lack of awareness of them; Harman’s analogy of the drugged man in Tool-Being provides a compelling example. [44] Now if somehow you get it wrong, you end up with bombast: the limit where objects become vague, undefined, just clutter (the word bombast literally means “stuffing,” the kind found in shoulder pads).

(3) Transport. The narrator makes you feel something stirring inside you, some kind of divine or demonic energy, as if you were inhabited by an alien. “Being moved,” “being stirred.” [45] We can imagine the sublime as a kind of transporter, like in Star Trek, a device for beaming the alien object into another object’s frame of reference. Transport consists of sensual contact with objects as an alien universe. Just as the transporter can only work by translating particles from one place to another, so Longinian transport only works by one object translating another via its specific frames of reference. In so doing, we become aware of what was lost in translation. Transport thus depends upon something much richer than a void: the open secret reality of the universe of objects, the aspect that is forever sealed from access but nevertheless thinkable.

The machinery of transport, the transporter as such, is what Longinus calls amplification: not bigness but a feeling of (as Doctor Seuss puts it) “biggering”: “[a figure] employed when the matters under discussion or the points of an argument allow of many pauses and many fresh starts from section to section, and the grand phrase come rolling out one after another with increasing effect”; in this way Plato, for instance, “often swells into a mighty expanse of grandeur.” [46] By attuning our mind to the exploding notes of an object, amplification sets up a sort of subject-quake, a soul-quake.

(4) Phantasia. Often translated as “visualization.” [47] Visualization not imagery: producing an inner object. It’s imagery in you not in the text. Quintilian remarks that phantasia makes absent things appear to be present. [48] Phantasia conjures an object. If I say “New York” and you’re a New Yorker, you don’t have to tediously picture each separate building and street. You sort of evoke New Yorkness in your mind. That’s phantasia. What I’ve called the poetics of spice operates this way: the use of the word “spice” (rather than say cinnamon or pepper) in a poem acts as a blank allowing for the work of olfactory imagination akin to visualization. [49] It’s more like a hallucination than an intended thought. [50] In stories, for instance, phantasia generates an object-like entity that separates us from the narrative flow—puts us in touch with the alien as alien. Visualization should be slightly scary: you are summoning a real deity after all, you are asking to be overwhelmed, touched, moved, stirred.

The suddenness of an alien appearance in my phenomenal space is an apparition. In OOO terms, phantasia is the capacity of an object to imagine another object. This depends upon a certain sensual contact. How paper looks to stone. How scissors look to paper. Do objects dream? Do they contain virtual versions of other objects inside them? These would be examples of phantasia. How one object impinges upon another one. There is too much of it. It magnetizes us with a terrible compulsion.

We should briefly recap what we now know about the Longinian sublime. Longinus says that sublimity is “the echo of a noble mind.” There isn’t much difference between human souls, if they exist, and the souls of badgers, ferns, and seashells. The Longinian sublime is based on coexistence. At least one other thing exists, apart from me: that “noble mind,” whose footprint I find in my inner space. By contrast, the more familiar concepts of the sublime are based on the experience of just one person. It’s my fear and terror, my shock and awe (Burke). It’s my freedom, my infinite inner space (Kant). Of course, some object triggers the sublime. But then you drop the trigger and just focus on the state: this is especially true in Kant. And Burke is just about oppression. It’s about the power of kings and bombing raids. Why couldn’t the sublime object be something vulnerable or kind?

Let’s think again about how causality is aesthetic. The sublime, on this view, is how fresh objects are born. Suddenly, other objects discover these shards of glass in their world, fragments of broken object embedded in their flesh, scattered over the floor. It’s not so much that Burke and Kant are wrong, but that what they’re thinking is ontologically secondary to the notion of coexistence. Longinus puts the sublime a way back in the causal sequence, in the “noble” being that leaves its footprint on you. In this sense, it’s in the object, in the not-me. Thus the sublime tunes us to what is not me. This is good news in an ecological era. Before it’s fear or freedom, the sublime is coexistence.

Now for an example of the Longinian sublime, take Harman’s first great use of the “meanwhile” trope (which Quentin Meillassoux calls the rich elsewhere), in his paper “Object-Oriented Philosophy”:

This is nobody’s world. This is sort of the opposite of stock-in-trade environmentalist rhetoric (which elsewhere I’ve called ecomimesis): “Here I am in this beautiful desert, and I can prove to you I’m here because I can write that I see a red snake disappearing into that creosote bush. Did I tell you I was in a desert? That’s me, here, in a desert. I’m in a desert.” [52] This is no man’s land. But it’s not a bleak void. Bleak void, it turns out, is just the flip side of correlationism’s world. No. This is a crowded Tibetan zoo, an Expressionist parade of uncanny, clownlike objects. We’re not supposed to kowtow to these objects as Burke would wish. Yet we’re not supposed to find our inner freedom either (Kant). It’s like one of those maps with the little red arrow that says You Are Here, only this one says You Are Not Here.